These past few weeks, we’ve been working on having cool ruins to replace the buildings when they are destroyed.

This was not easy. In the first place, we don’t want to have stupid amounts of geometry going directly to your video card. In order to maintain the low poly look, we have to be resourceful in how we show the destruction.

While doing this we had to resort to nested prefabs (which we will cover next week. Spoilers!), deal with a lot of trouble we had with the .FBX and with the project order in almost every fracking level of it.

Well, here is the thing:

First, we had these nice little buildings, each one in its own file.

That was cool, except for the fact that when we decided to add the ruins, some of the buildings shared the destroyed version. So, duplicating the ruins in each file would have added useless geometry, and not doing it would have been messy (and my little OCD bug would have killed me).

We didn’t have an satisfactory way of doing it. So we decided to put the meshes in a few .FBXs. Doing this would mean less file access, and putting the same ruins to share models would save us a lot of polys. And everything would be tidy.

In our organized wall society, we do not tolerate new ideas.

So we ended up with only two or three files in this fashion, using only two or three textures per file. I think it is pretty optimized, but not perfect. I really wanted to optimize everything. I… have… to optimize… more…

I’m implementing all the solutions in the city of Delphi and when everything is working, I will do the same on the other cities.

As almost every modeler using Unity knows, I have to work with both the modelling tool and Unity to really know how it’s going to look. So, here is how it looks in Unity!

(Click to enlarge!)

Well, next week we will talk about a really bummer, which is… NESTED PREFABS!

I have to stop using so many music references for the titles. But they are an easy way out, and I’m lazy!

Anyway, very briefly, these past weeks we’ve been finishing up the design of most of Okhlos’ HUD and windows. We had to make a lot of hard choices, and we are still changing a lot of things that aren’t closed yet.

(Our previous HUD vs. the new one. Click to enlarge!)

It’s hard, because you have to anticipate how the player will interact with the given information, so you have to guess a lot.

The most significant change was adapting everything to a 1 on 1 pixel aspect. Every element was 2x in the original pixel art work. We decided (actually, I didn’t consult Sebastian and went on with it without telling him until it was finished) to make everything 1x, meaning to respect the pixel art as is.

This is the Items Thing (technical terminology). It’s function is to show you the keys assigned to each item and tell you if anyone in your mob is carrying one of those items.If you don’t have an item, it will be shown in gray. The image you see is here is the one that will be shown if you are using a joystick, we didn’t do the keyboard graphic yet. And as you can see, it’s much prettier if you treat each pixel as a pixel, instead of scaling them.

This is the story of the basic buttons. At first, we used to use the Dalek font (don’t know the relation between a Greek font and Dr. Who) and the sprites at 2x. Later, we switched to a more pixel-friendly font. Finally, last week, we took them to the actual size.

Here you can see the mob count tab, that shows the number of people you have in your mob , how it was and how it currently is .

The “1P” in the first image is a sign of how much more we were focused on multiplayer during the early stages of development. The second attempt added the mob’s rage bar. This bar basically shows how rampageous your mob is, increasing when the mob smashes things or tramples enemies, and decreasing over time. Finally, I made the third option last week, it’s not final yet, but we decided to show a mob icon/graphic, and separate the bar from the mob count.

(click to enlarge!)

This is the pause menu. This may be the most important window of all. Here, you will see all of your units, heroes, and the mob modifiers. If you have a hero that gives you +10% attack bonus, you will see it here. It’s faaar from finished yet but we think that is important to keep it as simple as possible. Too much information will ruin the window completely, it will frustrate the player when navigating it. So we will try a lot of mockups to see how we can best convey all the information.

And keep in mind that things can get a little crowded.

Yeah, that’s too much information. Feel free to feel overwhelmed by clicking the picture and pressing F11 (In chrome and in PC, don’t know in other systems).

As always, we love your comments! You can reach us in Facebook, Twitter or right down here! We try to answer all of them! (Please stop sending us nude pictures)

Well, as John Green says, Don’t forget to be awesome!

Roque

(Yeah, I know, I never sign the posts, I suppose that I’m very hipster lately)

Ahoy! So much time has passed since the last update. These past weeks have been a rollercoaster. Some good things happened, some not so good also… Whatever. Today I will talk, among other things, about cholulaje. Cholulaje is an Argentinian lunfardo (or colloquialism) word that means something like celebrity junkieness, or screen personality fandom.

It all started quite suddenly one day. I woke up, made some coffee and started my morning routine, which involves checking mails and checking Facebook for like half an hour. I had two mails and Facebook messages stating the same thing: we had appeared in Rock Paper Shotgun! That was incredible, we couldn’t believe it. We had never sent anything to any media outlet, but there it was, a beautiful article about Okhlos! (Here is the article)

It was amazing. Suddenly, we had a lot of tweets. People following our twitter account (here :))! And our owns accounts also. Lots of people retweeted the article. Also, we had a few comments on the article, and I could argue with the public for the first time!

A few hours later. Mail from Kotaku. Chris Person wanted to do a Let’s Play of Okhlos. We were beyond words. We worked a lot in order to have a semi stable version for Chris. Setting a deadline always helps to keep the rhythm and prevents from getting too relaxed, so the pressure of having to send them something quickly ended up being a good thing .

Some days later, when everything was sort of OK, we sent him the version. What a thrill! (sounding like a little school girl). A week after that, during my morning routine, I noticed that we had a lot of musician offers, some mails and lots of tweets. The reason was obvious, Kotaku had published the article.

Finally, IndieGames on Twitter asked developers for .GIFs of their games. After a few technical details, I prepared some GIFs and sent them. Thus we also made it into in the article for #GIFriday!

After that, I talked to John from IndieGames and he told me that he wanted to do a series of GIFs explaining the game, we were thrilled, and we started to work on more GIFs. If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong when you are talking with the press. My PC started to freeze when I tried to convert the video into gif, the hardware acceleration in photoshop suddenly decided to stop working, and our first 480px gifs ended up with a size of 20mb (which is not a good thing). Fortunately, we managed to make the gifs, and of a reasonable size. I will not post them here, because the article hasn’t came out yet, and I don’t want to spoil their exclusivity. But I will post them on future updates.